User's posts go to approval queue due to incorrect user post count

Bug
1

On one of my self-hosted installs, I have a user whose posts go to the approval queue, and I cannot figure out why. Here’s what I know:

  • The staff action log does not mention the post being sent to the queue, just the approvals that follow.
  • This posts appear to be innocent, no links, for example just a quote and text.
  • The user isn’t silenced, so I don’t think this is caused by a min first post typing time violation.
  • We have not modified any setting that matches approve, e.g. approve post count and approve unless trust level are both 0.
  • The user is not staged.
  • It appears that three of four topics / posts the user has created have been affected.

Is there any reason left for why the posts go to approval?

2 Likes
2

I think it has to do with first_post_typing_time as that sometimes mutes and sometimes does not.

3

The user says that she’s definitely typing more than three seconds, and not pasting in text typed somewhere else.
Either way, I set min first post typing time to 0, maybe that’ll help.

4

Rogue browser setup would be my guess? Remember the detailed first post checks mostly only apply to trust level 0 users.

Have this user try in a different web browser and on their phone versus computer.

5

Than that shouldn’t be it as that user is TL1 :thinking:

6

I’m not sure. Do you have any Watched Words that force posts into approval?

7

No, there are no watched words at all.

8

The user has just noticed that the post counter in her profile is off – it’s currently at zero, but has been negative before.

I think this explains what has been happening – even if approve post count is 0, if a users post count is off, he can run into this check:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/b87205831bf3d6c6226f628bc91dfa6d04534630/lib/new_post_manager.rb#L79

4 Likes
9

Did this person have a lot of pms that got deleted or posts that got deleted somehow? Your theory makes sense.

We should add protection here @neil in some form.

1 Like
10

There was some post deletion.

The story is that that user sent me a PM, asking a question of which she was not sure whether she was allowed to ask that in public. I answered, and then asked her whether she was OK with making that public. She agreed, I deleted the discussion about turning the message public, and then used the feature to turn the message into a normal, public topic.

Apart from this, nothing fancy happened to the account, I think.

Also, there was another conversation before that that was converted from a public topic to a message before I replied.

Apart from this, nothing fancy happened to the account, I think. (Again.)

3 Likes
12

I confirmed there was a problem with post counting in personal messages and made a fix.

Deleting a post in personal message would subtract from the user’s post count stat, but they aren’t counted when they’re created. So post counts can become negative. Changing topics from personal to/from public was adjusting counts correctly.

3 Likes
13

How can we fix this for existing accounts? Is there a way to trigger a re-count?

14

We don’t have a way to do a recount, but I’m building a task to do it.

3 Likes
15

That sounds perfect :+1:

(I’d love it if it also recalculated other counters, specifically the number of topics per category, as we also have a – likely unrelated – weirdness there.)

16

I added rake users:recalculate_post_counts.

We already do that once per day. Open a new topic about it with details.

7 Likes
17

Since this has now landed in beta, I can confirm rake users:recalculate_post_counts did its job and the problem is solved :+1:

Thanks! :heart:

6 Likes